75 Years In The Forward: British Colonial Minister William Ormsby-Gore reported in the British Parliament that the Arab population of Palestine has increased, mainly as a result of the increase of the Jewish population. Ormsby-Gore reported that since 1922, more than 250,000 Arabs have immigrated to Palestine. They have moved there to avail themselves of the economic opportunities that have been created as a result of the arrival of large numbers of Jews, who have settled mainly in the areas of Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem. In those areas they have created large agricultural settlements in which many Arabs work.

Music: First, some rebetika, the music of the "Greek" people dispersed from Asia Minor in the ethnic cleansing of the 1920s, as played in Israel today. Totally different, when I posted the Specials earlier this week, I somehow managed to miss George Szirtes' fantastic "A few days of ska" series. I had never heard of Slim Smith, who is great. Here's a different sort of ska, from South London:

Thursday, June 23, 2011

I was surprised a while back when a friend told me she had been celebrating Eid at Kelsey Kerridge Sports Hall. The reason is very simple – the current Cambridge Mosque is housed in a fairly small building on Mawson Road and cannot accommodate everyone who wants to worship there. So a new mosquehas been planned on nearby Mill Road.

I saw today in the local paper that the EDL plans to march in protest against the new mosque on 9 July. They explain:

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The English Defence League marched through Redbridge and Dagenham yesterday (unusually with no police escort in Redbridge), and, true to form, they Asian local residents, one of whom had his jaw broken. More from Flesh is Grass and Hope Not Hate.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

That's 21-year old Hagit Yasou, of Ethiopian origin but from Sderot in the Western Negev, singing in Arabic on Israel's "A Star is Born" talent show. Kind of puts the X Factor into perspective. (H/t The Blank Pages)

Saturday, June 11, 2011

I never realised that the great Cuban anarchist Tarrida Del Marmol is buried less than a mile from my house in Brockley and Ladywell cemetery. How did I miss that? On the other hand, I did know about Toulouse Lautrec in Catford.

Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism'Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, on the Today programme this week (h/t Gregor). Conspiracy theories cannot be refuted, he argues, because the response to counterfacts is simply to expand the scope of the conspiracy theory claim. He also suggests that the "basic structure" was laid down in the Protocols of the Elders, although antisemitic theories are now in the minority.

Libyan agents began forging ties with the leaders of Canada’s extreme right in the late 1980s. Twice, the Gaddafi regime brought delegations of Canadian “white nationalists” to Tripoli, where they were feted and given cash. “The common ground was the hatred of Jews,” said Grant Bristow, who went on one of the trips in his capacity as an undercover Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent. “That was the basis of the relationship.”

The far right folk in question are Don Andrews of the Nationalist Party and his friend Wolfgang Droege, the co-founder of the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. There is an amusing bit when they discover Gaddafi is also funding the ANC...

at the time of writing, not a single official of Serbia, Montenegro or the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – i.e. of the regime that organised the war – nor any officer of the JNA (excluding officers of the Bosnian Serb army who had previously served in the JNA) has been convicted by the ICTY of war crimes in Bosnia. The weight of ICTY punishment has, so far, fallen exclusively on the Bosnian Serbs, while the regime of Milosevic in Belgrade and the leadership of the JNA have been mostly let off the hook.[...] As for Mladic, he was merely a middle-ranking agent in the planning and launching of this enterprise – more than a pawn, but not more than a knight or a bishop. So while his arrest and trial should be celebrated, and while we have much to expect from it, let us not pretend that justice is being served.

Mladic has some strange supporters, including Pamela Geller, who claims only a couple of hundred were killed at Srebrenica.

The cities that nobody sings
The music at the top, courtesy of Brockley Dave, is by nick nicely. Wikipedia sez:

nick nicely (always spelled with lower case n) is a British musician. His music can be categorized as psychedelic rock. nicely was born in 1959 in Greenland during a transatlantic stopover by his parents, but he grew up in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, as Nickolas Laurien. [...] "Hilly Fields (1892)", released by EMI in 1982, is regarded by many as nicely's masterpiece and in spite of, or due to, its obscurity is considered in some circles as "legendary".[1] "Hilly Fields" took almost a year to complete, and the track features an obvious 1960s pychedelic influence, cello playing, the 1980s synth-pop sound and what may have been the first ever example of scratching on a non-hiphop recording. The title is inspired byHilly Fields park in Brockley, southeast London.

I am continuing my edit wrangle at Wikipedia on the Counterpunch article, where a couple of editors who believe that Israel harvests Palestinian organs exercise a very high degree of "ownership" over the article, deleting any possible suggestion that Counterpunch is anything other than on the side of the angels. To that end, I am just pasting here a sentence that was deleted from the article, and the sources cited, for the record. In a while, I will return to the article and try another way of saying this and see what happens.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

We have already discussed at some length in several differentcommentthreads some of the ethical, political and practical issues of dealing with racism in comment threads and so on. Two very different but related developments have made this stuff more pressing for me. This post briefly reflects on that, and is probably only of interest to regular readers, and so I'm putting it below the fold.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

I had a wonderful Brockley weekend. In Saturday's glorious sunshine, I was on Hillyfields at the Brockley Maxfestival. Some galleries here. Thankfully, no Gilad Atzmon playing this year, and I didn't manage to lose any of the kids I was in charge of this year. Didn't realise that excellent new local business Hills and Parkes would have a food stall, so bought a Turkish picnic from the TFC in Lewisham. Brockley Max is now in its 11th year, and testament to the level of communal and creative energy down here.

Then Sunday was Big Lunch day. Lewisham is the world capital of big lunches, apparently. There were several in my area. In what estate agents are now calling "Crofton Park Village", Peter the butcher (a local hero) had a busy day supplying meat to the barbecues, and there were bouncy castles across Honor Oak Park.

Unfortunately, the weather was not so good. (I blame David Cameron for corrupting the word "big".) The street I was on we had a cake competition, rum punch, a pub quiz, a salsa lesson, a raffle and some gorgeous food. It all got a bit British by the end, sheltering under the gazebo, but wonderful nonetheless.

If you have a Big Lunch story you'd like to share, please do in the comment thread.

Here's Marlin Chops, who headlined at Brockley Dave's big lunch ("despite gazeebo galore the equipment and band was in danger from water getting in"), doing a not bad version of one of my favourite songs, all too apt given the weather.

The antisemitism of good intentions
The UCU congress at the weekend, at which my trade union voted to disassociate itself from the EUMC working definition of antisemitism at any possible opportunity and not to use it in any education or dispute context was, in my view. David Hirsh live-blogged. A few lies and distortions in the debate. Sue Blackwell claimed the EUMC definition was used to stifle free speech when Denis Macshane tried to get the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge not to host Hamas' Azzam Tamimi. As far as I can see, however, Macshane was unsuccessful; he did not quote the EUMC working definition; he did not go through the union but through the university management and the government; and Tamimi's main offence is not his intensified criticisms of Israel but the fact that he is a spokesperson for a terrorist organisation that engages in killing Jews. Also worth noting that the previous week, Cambridge had cancelled Benny Morris from speaking after the university’s Islamic and Pakistan societies who claimed he was an “Islamophobic hate speaker”, so not good evidence for the EUMC working definition stifling free debate on Israel/Palestine.

Sean Wallis, who once darkly accused the anti-boycott movement to be fuelled by secret Lehman Brothers accounts, made a bizarre "asajew" intervention against the EUMC claiming he had been libelled, although the EUMC working definition appears to have had no negative impact on his ability to speak freely in the union. Blackwell made use of Richard Kuper's attacks on the EUMC, including his allegation that it is the product of American Zionists, invoking Kenneth Stern as evidence. As I wrote once in a comment thread here:

Levi denies that "expert on antisemitism" is a good way to describe Stern and prefers "American Zionist". For those of you with longer memories, Stern was the defence lawyer for the AIM activists, including Leonard Peltier, who were indicted for the events at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation and regarded as heroes by most on the left who don't see everything through the framework of only-Israel-is-evil. He has written vast amounts on this case, on the Militia movement and religious right in America, on David Duke, on Nazi skinheads, and on hate crime in general. He has written nothing that I am aware of that is about Israel.

(Whenever I hear people start speeches with the words "Speaking as a Jew...", I remember my time as a delegate to the NUS conference ca.1990, when I heard two different men (one in Socialist Organiser, now AWL) say "Speaking as a lesbian and gay man"...)